Archive for May, 2012

This week’s shirt at Comic Strip Tees is our very own Alice Brown (What a Clown!), starring the talented young webcomics ingenue from The Magic Pen. Alice will feature prominently in books two and three of The Magic Pen trilogy, so establish your Alice Brown fangirl/boy credentials ahead of the crowd with this stylish piece of fully-authorised official Alice BrownTM merchandise.

The Alice Brown t-shirt comes in various sizes (guys and girls) and costs only US$20. AVAILABLE FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY (4 weeks, to be precise).

Daniela: The first question I have is about a guiding theme throughout the story: the map, mapping and the description of the world. What fascinates you so much to make this theme omnipresent in the book, in the main story and several subtracks and stories? What do you think, about comics as “creators of worlds, universes?”

Dylan: I’ve always loved maps, and especially imaginary maps, like the ones you find in fantasy novels and games. When I was writing Hicksville, I was very interested in spatial vs. temporal ideas of narrative: geography vs. history. All of this fed into Hicksville, and I started thinking of stories (comics, novels, histories) as a way of mapping worlds – real and imaginary. The thing about maps is that they are always fictions, more or less. A map isn’t an actual landscape, it’s a representation of a landscape, and so it’s always a simplification, a simulation, an artificial model. It’s a way of talking about the landscape. It tells a story about place.

Comics are especially interesting as maps, because they can use pictures, diagrams, words. They can talk about a landscape (in space or time) in very complex and interesting ways. Many cartoonists have played with this (some consciously, some by accident); Chris Ware is a good example.